Lazarus - Game Developers Edition

[Vincent]

Vincent, what tool is being used to package Lazarus? I think I should get familiar with it.

Inno setup.

The current installer scripts are in lazarus\tools\install\win (or win32 for 0.9.20).

Vincent

[WILL]

Excellent. Should make putting together an installer package easy then.

I guess I'll see what libraries are Lazarus ready as a start. From there I can tell what work needs to be done to make the rest Lazarus capable.

[WILL]

So how blasphemous would it be to do a standard install of 0.9.20, install everything (libraries, templates, etc) that I want into an edition release and use InnoSetup to make my installation from that?

Or is that pretty much what happens within the Laz Team anyhow?

[Vincent]

So how blasphemous would it be to do a standard install of 0.9.20, install everything (libraries, templates, etc) that I want into an edition release and use InnoSetup to make my installation from that?

Or is that pretty much what happens within the Laz Team anyhow?

It more or less what the lazarus team does, but we have 'make bigide' to install everything.

As long as take care of license of the plug-ins :-). See the FAQ about licensing in the lazarus wiki.

[WILL]

Yes, the IDEIntf part of the IDE is licensed under the LGPL with the same exception, so that shared data structures in this part will not force you to license your plug-in or design-time package under the GPL. We want everyone to be free to choose what plug-in to use, and not limit this choice. Therefore non-GPL compatible plug-ins are allowed. Note that it's not allowed to distribute a precompiled Lazarus with these non-GPL-compatible plugins included statically; however, we do not see this as a severe limitation, since recompiling Lazarus is easy.

Doesn't this sort of defeat the whole concept of an 'all-in-one, out-of-the-box' edition of Lazarus for game programmers?

So if I say, added SDL, OpenAL, FMOD and OpenGL as a few examples, I cannot include the DLL files in the same installation?

Though I think that FMOD *may* be an exception, I think the rest are freely available to distribute...

[Vincent]

Yes, the IDEIntf part of the IDE is licensed under the LGPL with the same exception, so that shared data structures in this part will not force you to license your plug-in or design-time package under the GPL. We want everyone to be free to choose what plug-in to use, and not limit this choice. Therefore non-GPL compatible plug-ins are allowed. Note that it's not allowed to distribute a precompiled Lazarus with these non-GPL-compatible plugins included statically; however, we do not see this as a severe limitation, since recompiling Lazarus is easy.

Doesn't this sort of defeat the whole concept of an 'all-in-one, out-of-the-box' edition of Lazarus for game programmers?

So if I say, added SDL, OpenAL, FMOD and OpenGL as a few examples, I cannot include the DLL files in the same installation?

Though I think that FMOD *may* be an exception, I think the rest are freely available to distribute...

That depends on their license. If they did not make their License GPL compatible, for example by using LGPL, that may be aproblem, but IANAL.

I don't think this is a problem for SDL for example.

[WILL]

Giving this more thought....

I believe I know of a way around this apparent limitation in Lazarus' Licensing policy. Simply by supplying a separately downloadable module or package(s) for the Game Developer's Edition we could in fact do it in a friendly way without stepping on licensing toes.

It's perfectly legit to bundle Laz with wrappers and open libraries, right? The problem as I see it, is the closed source (dynamic) library files that have non-GPL licencing attached to them.

[jdarling]

If you want to get around this in a legal way, you can also have your installer provide an option to call a service (or another application) that downloads the DLL's and places them into proper folders. Of course, it could also download them as a single ZIP and extract them.

This way, the Laz IDE is not being "Shipped" with invalid assets, and instead its an option to download . I've had to use the loophole for a few applications that required packages that had to be "Downloaded from XYZ". They never say how it has to be downloaded, just that it can't be sent with your application. Thus you provide the option to download them for the user.

Of course, my example isn't directly in effect, but its the same idea.

[Vincent]

If you want to get around this in a legal way, you can also have your installer provide an option to call a service (or another application) that downloads the DLL's and places them into proper folders. Of course, it could also download them as a single ZIP and extract them.

I think the criterium is not what is in the installation package, but what is linked into the lazarus executable.

[jdarling]

[quote="Vincent"]I think the criterium is not what is in the installation package, but what is ]

An EXE can link or link to anything. Its only what you distribute with your EXE. Otherwise, you couldn't link the DX8 libraries and require a download as separate and still have your application be GPL/LGPL. And there are plenty of games out there that do this.

The BEST solution if this was a concern would be to dynamically link the libraries instead of statically linking them. That way there are no ties that bind, and you can still provide the down-loader I talked about. Of course, that would require some changes to Lazarus itself to make it fail or recover gracefully instead of just barfing on your desktop .